Various
by aces
Summary: Short bits that don't really deserve separate entries. Occasionally slashy, occasionally not.
1. Games

Title: Games  
Author: aces  
Rating: meh, PG at most  
Warnings: Two men kissing! Close your eyes, people!  
Notes: No, I have no clue, honestly.

GAMES

"How the hell can you do that?" Bobby asks him in a frustrated growl, pacing the room.  
  
Darien is playing solitaire at the pool table taking pride of place in his apartment. "How can I do what?"  
  
"Play those damned card games. Don't they bore the hell out of you?"  
  
"No," Darien replies, moving one small set of cards and turning over the card beneath. It's a repeated pattern, old and worn and comfortably familiar like his favourite Barfly t-shirt. He likes the routine, the clear knowledge of the only possibilities that will come next. It's a bit of sanity in an otherwise insane life.  
  
"They bore me," Bobby spits out and sprawls into the chair across the table from Darien. "Can't you do something else?"  
  
"Like what? We could play poker, but you don't trust me not to turn all the aces invisible and put them up my sleeve."  
  
"Hell no, not after last time." And this is old and worm and comfortably familiar too, and Darien doesn't want that to change either. Is it weird to think of Bobby as a semblance of sanity? Yeah, probably. "Do you ever do anything, Fawkes?"  
  
"I'm playing cards right now," Darien responds, on the defence but not caring too particularly. "I read. I listen to music. I make paper airplanes. It might not sound like much, but it's a fulfilling life."  
  
Bobby Hobbes has an eloquent snort.  
  
A flip, a swish, the seven of hearts. Useless for now. Even the thief thing had been a helluva lot more stable than these days—it had to be, or else you were a pretty crappy thief. And, okay, yeah, he hadn't been the greatest thief, but the thing with the old guy was just a huge mistake that anyone coulda made...  
  
Flip, swish, slap as a card is thrown down on the wood table. Bobby's being awfully quiet now, and Darien looks up to see what he's doing now.  
  
"You're seriously not bored?" Bobby asks the instant their eyes meet.  
  
Darien rolls his eyes and slouches lower in his seat. "Do I look bored? No. Am I constantly whining about being bored? No. I am perfectly content with my card game."  
  
"Let's go out," Bobby says. "C'mon, you and me, two guys out to conquer the world. We'll have fun."  
  
"I'm having fun," Darien insists.  
  
Bobby growls and flops back in his chair. "Hey, don't let me hold you back," Darien says, glancing up again while flipping the discard pile idly through nimble fingers. Thief's fingers, used to snatching and grabbing quickly, fiddling with the little things. "You don't have to stick around, Hobbes."  
  
"What, am I screwing up your routine?"  
  
Darien frowns down at his evenly spread out piles of cards. "What routine?" he asks.  
  
"Your routine, you know, your routine. Isn't this the way you wind down, cool off, chill, before calling it a night, turning out the lights, heading off to bed?"  
  
"Uh...yeah, I guess." He flips another card, three of clubs, nothing doing, he discards it with a neat little twist of his wrist. "So what? You like to go out and party, I like a quiet night in. What's the big deal?"  
  
"What big deal, there's no big deal." He's talking fast again, the way he does when he's nervous or avoiding a subject he wants to talk about but doesn't. Darien looks up at him again, suspiciously. "You just like your routine."  
  
Flip, swish, a gentle smack as the card lands on top of another card. The cards are bent, dirty to the touch; he's had them forever. Perhaps there's grooves in them from where he holds them, where he always places his fingers, automatically. He savours the uncertainty in the routine; he doesn't know if he'll win or lose this game, but he knows one or the other is inevitable, and he knows his pattern of playing, the best pattern he's come up with in order to win over years and years of playing solitaire. It's strangely soothing, the repetition of oft-used manipulations, strategies.  
  
If maybe a little boring.  
  
"Yeah, I like my routine," Darien says. "So what? You have your routines too. Like the way you clean your gun. Or the way you check everything in your specific order in Golda. Jesus, Hobbes, you've got more routine than I do."  
  
Bobby shrugs, working his whole body into it the way he does when he's really trying to be elaborately casual. Darien decides it's best just to ignore him and continue playing. But the game isn't holding the same comforting appeal it's held for so long. Suddenly it seems pointless, unthinking routine.  
  
He could be spending his time in better ways.  
  
Calmly, Darien pushes all the cards together in a giant pile in front of him. Bobby watches him, frowning. "Fawkes? I don't think I know this game."  
  
Darien grins. "Could play a little fifty-two card pickup."  
  
Still got an eloquent snort. "You play. I'll sit this one out."  
  
"You can't sit this one out," Darien says. "It's a two-person game."  
  
"Oh yeah." Bobby sounds sceptical. "I'm not much of one for card games, Fawkes."  
  
"Not a card game," Darien shakes his head seriously. He stands up and gestures for Bobby to do the same. Hobbes does so, frowning. Darien comes closer, and when Bobby opens his mouth to talk, the younger man kisses him.  
  
After a while he steps back, and Bobby looks up at him thoughtfully. "Now that game I could like," he said.  
  
"I thought you might."  
  
They ended up having to play fifty-two card pickup anyway, but only much, much later.


	2. What Others Tell You

Title: What Others Tell You  
Author: aces  
Rating: G  
Notes: I was bored one night?

_What Others Tell You_

He used to believe that everyone knew him better than he knew himself, and therefore he should listen to everything they said and believe them. And when they told him he wasn't trying hard enough, and when they told him he could do so much better if only he applied himself, he believed them. But that didn't mean he had to do what was implied in their complaints and remonstrances. He even believed his brother when Kevin yelled at him.

And when Liz told him he just might make a halfway decent thief, he believed her too. Hey, it was something to do. Not to mention really impressive to all the guys.

But at some point, he stopped believing them, stopped believing everyone when they said they trusted him, when they said he'd done wrong and was going to jail, when they said they loved him, when they said he was smart or he was an idiot. He stopped listening, closed his ears to the white noise, and carried on with what he wanted to do. Though maybe by that point it wasn't so much what he wanted to do as it was he didn't know what else to do.

It was easier that way. He only had to listen to himself, and sometimes he didn't even bother doing that much. It wasn't like he had anything particularly interesting or insightful to say about himself, after all.

He'd never even really listened to Casey, even. But then, it wasn't as if she'd have anything useful to say, since half of what he told her about himself was necessarily lies. But sometimes, sometimes he caught something of her words, of her honest-to-god's truthful opinions about him, and it warmed him up a bit. Until he remembered he wasn't really who she thought he was, and then he just shut his ears and coolly stopped listening again.

When he got stuck with the gland, everyone was telling him what they thought of him. Kevin had always been very exact and specific in his remarks regarding his brother, but, hell, even _Eberts_ occasionally told him exactly what he thought of the ex-thief. Bobby and the Keep and at times even the 'Fish never shut up about what they thought of him.

It was irritating at first, having to ignore all that white noise. But then like Casey, he started paying attention occasionally, and heard what they had to say about him. And what they didn't have to say about him, or simply how they acted around him. Like how Bobby would start doing things instantly when he snapped at him to do them in the middle of a firefight, or how when he and Bobby could just start flowing together when working out a case, and how sometimes Bobby would just take his criminal expertise as useful rather than something to be sneered at.

And Claire always had the keychain crap ready to placate (irritate, more like), and when the Official wasn't feeling gleefully and bureaucratically godlike, he could be quite complimentary in his own...odd way. The kid was applying himself. He was trying to do more.

He used to believe that everyone knew him better than he knew himself, and therefore he should listen to everything they said and believe them. And he found himself thinking that, even if they didn't really know him better than he knew himself, they might at least occasionally have the right idea.


	3. drabble

_Untitled_

__

All colour had been drained out of his life. He realised this was true once he started dreaming occasionally in quicksilver. He'd never told them this desperate reason to get rid of the damned gland, this particular reason among so many others. He wasn't sure how he could tell them he was afraid of becoming black and white without his shades of brown and navy blue and neon orange, afraid of turning permanently into the silver ghost that no-one would ever see again.

One Simon Cole in the world was enough.

Bobby kept colour in his life. Bobby was brown for him, and his own shades of forest green and light blue and deep, dark, black red. Darien clung to Bobby's colours, and when he dreamt of Bobby in the night, he never dreamed in quicksilver, but in full, glorious Technicolour.


	4. Sense of Community scene continuation

Title: That Ol' Sense of Community...  
Author: aces  
Rating: PG-ish  
Warnings: Male and female kiss! Close your eyes, people!  
Notes: When rewatching "Sense of Community" recently, I was shocked to discover that my mind had built up an elaborate deception on me and that this continuation of the "interrogation" scene between Darien and Helene _didn't_ happen. So obviously I had to write it myself to rectify this horrible omission.

That Ol' "Sense of Community"...

_Helene Loew: You ask me? I think he's gay.  
__Darien: Really? Ahhh...  
__"Sense of Community"_

"And what about you?" Helene Loew looked at Darien Fawkes speculatively over her drink. "You don't _really_ want to leave the community, do you?" She leaned forward a little. Darien tried to look away from the new and interesting view he had of her cleavage.

"Uh, well..." Darien wasn't paying attention to what was coming out of his mouth. Darien wasn't thinking about the green segments quickly and quietly turning red on his wrist. Darien wasn't really thinking about much of anything at all at the moment, in point of fact.

Helene slipped out of her deck chair, setting her glass down on the table as she passed. She slid into Darien's lap, casually wrapping her arms around his neck. "Come on," she whispered, smiling in what Darien had to admit was a very friendly fashion. "It's not all bad here, you know. Nobody's shooting at you, nobody's going to stab you in the back; you have everything you need..."

"Uh..." Darien looked away from her breasts only to be confronted by her lips. He forced his eyes up a little higher to meet her eyes. "My partner's house did just get blown up," he pointed out. It seemed like a reasonable counter-argument to make.

She dipped forward, long blonde hair falling over Darien's shoulder as she started mouthing at his neck. "Which is why you should just relax," she breathed into his ear, tickling the hairs right there, "and stick around. Don't make waves. There's... compensations to living here..."

She lightly kissed his lips, a teasing taste. Darien closed his eyes, kissed her in return, a back and forth dance that gradually built in intensity. He still wasn't thinking about green snake scales, and he'd kinda forgotten about explosions, and maybe if his hands had gotten anywhere near Helene Loew's breasts all thought in his head would have gone right out the window.

But while he was kissing Helene, an image of Bobby flicked into his head, Bobby holding the baseball bat and looking just a little freaked.

Darien pulled back, eyes flying open. "I can't," he said.

Helene growled and ducked her head forward toward his again, but he held up his hands in front of his face and pushed her gently out of his lap. "I can't," he repeated, standing up and inching around the woman, who was now glaring at him in a very unfriendly way. He was guiltily reminded of Bobby's assertions that she was the one trying to blow him up, and it made him want to get away from her that much faster. "I'm sorry," he said, backing out of her back yard, "I'm so sorry, don't get me wrong, I mean, you—you're—oh _yeah_—but Bobby's waiting for me, I can't let him down...I'm sorry..."

He fled.

Helene sucked in a breath through her teeth in frustration. "Are they _all_ gay these days?!" she yelled.


	5. Color Me Visible

Note: And in a review of that previous drabble above, suz asked: "I wonder what color D is in Bobby's life? Purple? Silver? Orange? What does Bobby dream of, and is it in color?" This doesn't quite answer the question, but it is what first popped into my head...

Color Me Visible

Bobby sometimes worried about Darien turning invisible.

Days when the Official manipulated and obfuscated and barely tolerated and laughed a wheezy little laugh that did nothing to diminish his power.

Days when Arnaud didn't show his whiny little punk ass but still made his presence felt, with annoyingly big words and floating cigarettes.

Days when madness reared its ugly little red-eyed head, and red showed up in other places on other people too, and Darien bled his own guilt.

Bobby sometimes worried about Darien turning invisible, and promised himself that he would always see his partner, down to the neon orange of his shirt, the brown of his eyes, and the white of his skin.


	6. Covered

Title: Covered  
Author: aces  
Warnings: No, I got no clue for this one. Making light-hearted fun of Darien's misery, perhaps, but that's nothing new, is it?  
Rating: PG for language  
Note: Actually written for the time constraint challenge on LJ's "contrelemonte" community but never posted there, and no this isn't really a very _short_ short piece but I'm being lazy.

Covered

And this was it, no seriously, this was _it_, they were gone for sure, now they ded from big bad explosions made by stupid terrorists, and no his life wasn't bothering to flash before his eyes because it'd done that enough times already and was sick and tired of being remembered, so the only thing he saw was Bobby.  
  
Bobby.  
  
Bobby was still kneeling over the bomb, tension written all over him as he dug around in wires and chips and timers and more wires. He was still trying to save them, even though the timer clearly said they only had a minute and they were gonna die, man, die as in dead, dead, dead.  
  
Shouldn't he have gotten used to this feeling at some point by now?  
  
"Fawkes, _help_ me," Bobby's voice was just a little on the tense side, not that he could blame his partner, he really couldn't blame him at all, and he didn't look up at Darien as he continued poking around in the bomb, tensely.  
  
"What can I do?!" he yelped, and continued pacing frantically while staring at his partner.  
  
"You can stop moving and get your punk ass _down_ here!" Bobby's voice sounded just a little more tense, and he decided maybe it'd be a good thing if he got down there and knelt with his partner. He didn't want them to die on bad terms. That would kinda suck. Thankfully last time he'd seen the Keep they'd laughed together. That was good. And he'd been nice to Eberts. He was proud of that.  
  
"_Fawkes_."  
  
Darien slid down to the ground across from his partner and almost skittered back when he saw the timer had but thirty seconds left on it. "Crap," he muttered, "crap crap crap..."  
  
"Shut _up_, Darien," Bobby ground out, and his fingers were still filled with wires as if he were some insane surgeon doing his thing in some mechanical body. "We are not gonna frickin' die here."  
  
Darien stared at the top of Bobby's bald head in disbelief and said, "We are _dead_, man, dead as in _dead_."  
  
"No we _aren't_."  
  
And his life wasn't flashing in front of his eyes, but Bobby was kneeling right there, and they had ten seconds left until the end of their little corner of the world.  
  
"I love you, Bobby," Darien blurted out.  
  
Bobby glanced up at him then, glaring. "_What_?" he barked out, and he never let go of the wires splayed in his hands.  
  
Darien kissed him, quick and hard, on the lips. He saw the timer blink down to zero. He squeezed his eyes shut.  
  
It didn't go off.

* * *

The bomb was a dud. A deliberate one, 'cos the terrorists were playing with them. Last laugh was on them, though, 'cos Bobby went in and _nailed_ their asses before they could set up the real bomb.  
  
Darien went home and buried his head under his pillow in an attempt to asphyxiate himself. Unfortunately, he didn't have the heart to actually put himself out of his own misery and ended up watching gawd-awful infomercials at three in the morning instead. When even that didn't kill him, he despaired.  
  
He called in sick the next day and huddled under his pillow again. This time he didn't bother trying the whole asphyxiation thing. He was just trying to drown out the sound of his partner banging down his front door and yelling at him to come out and stop being a fricking coward.  
  
Coward? Ha. This was discretion being the better part of survival-fricking-instinct, my friend.  
  
Eventually Bobby lock-picked the door and slammed it shut behind him and started yelling at Darien from inside the apartment instead of outside it. Darien just huddled further under the covers and pillow. It didn't do much to muffle the sound, though he supposed he was grateful the idiot agent had finally stopped drawing attention to himself. Darien hated it when the neighbors complained.  
  
When Bobby pulled the pillow out of Darien's grasp, Darien burrowed deeper under the covers. When Bobby started tugging at the covers, Darien found the death grip (_death_ grip, haha, isn't that funny, _not_) he'd misplaced with the pillow and clung on tenaciously. Eventually Bobby gave up with a disgusted snort and sat down on the edge of the bed.  
  
Darien pretended to ignore him. He didn't bother pretending to sleep, as that would have been childish.  
  
"Fawkes, you're being an idiot," Hobbes sounded aggravated. "_Again_. Would you just get off your self-pitying ass and help me get some work done?"  
  
As part of pretending to ignore someone usually includes pretending not to hear them, Darien decided not to answer this.  
  
Bobby tugged at the covers again, but Darien still had a firm grip and tugged viciously back. Bobby sighed. "Fawkes, the Official is breathing down my neck wanting to know where the hell you are, Monroe's bitching because she had to take up your slack, and Claire's pissed off with both of us for not coming in yesterday and getting you checked out by her. And _Eberts_ is being all snippity-smug because I'm getting all the crap this time, frickin' little _Eberts_..." Bobby continued to mutter in this vein for a few minutes, lulling Darien into a false sense of security until Bobby said, "And just because you felt a need for a final dud-bomb-death confession yesterday or whatever doesn't mean you get out of doing your fair share of the work today."  
  
Darien groaned, and buried his face so hard in his mattress he was sure his nose was gonna push a hole right through it. "G'way," he mumbled into the mattress, but Bobby occasionally had amazing powers of translation and understood him.  
  
"Can't, partner," he said and tugged again at the blankets. Darien didn't have the strength anymore. Anyway, his face was buried in his mattress so it wasn't like he could see Bobby's far-seeing brown eyes staring steadily into his own or anything.  
  
Instead he could just feel them boring into the back of his head.  
  
Bobby gently laid a hand on his back, over his left shoulder bone. "C'mon, Fawkes." His voice was almost gentle, and that was _really_ unfair and devious of him, and Darien just wasn't gonna play this time. "We got work to do."  
  
"No." Darien shook his head into the mattress, and Bobby punched his shoulder. Darien squawked.  
  
"I don't have _time_ for your little whining pity-parties," Bobby snapped. "And neither do you, Invisiboy. If you feel a need to sulk, do it on your own time, not on company's time, and _not_ on my time." He waited, but Darien didn't respond. "Fawkes!" he barked. "Get up _now_." He pulled the covers all the way off Darien, and started shoving at Darien, trying to turn him over and sit him up.  
  
Finally out of pity for his partner, and for his own skin which was getting decidedly bruised, Darien rolled himself over and sat up on the bed. His hair stuck up all over the place like a trimmed shrubbery gone horribly, horribly wrong, and he was wearing mismatching pajama pants and top that looked like they should have only come in boys' sizes and not to fit his lanky body. Bobby ignored all that and blinked at his partner, steady brown eyes.  
  
Darien closed his eyes and slumped.  
  
"Look...Fawkes," Bobby said, but Darien didn't open his eyes. "It was, an, uh, an—emotional moment. You were under a lot of stress. You thought you were gonna die. People say...weird...things...in moments like that. I understand, kid. It's okay. Just forget about it and move on, okay?"  
  
"Do people usually kiss other people in moments like that too?" Darien asked without opening his eyes.  
  
"Uh...well, I don't usually, but I may be unique like that, my friend." Bobby sounded really, really uncomfortable, and Darien wanted to crawl back under the covers again. When he felt a touch on his arm, he blinked his eyes open, startled.  
  
"It's okay, partner," Bobby said, looking at him.  
  
Darien drew back slightly, staring at Bobby warily. "You're not gonna kill me? You're not gonna throw me over a pier? You're not gonna haul my ass into the Fatman hand-cuffed and demand you never have to work with me again?"  
  
Bobby blinked, and frowned. "Why would I do that, partner? Look, I—uh—that is to say, I...well, I care deeply for you too; it's only natural, you're my partner, we've been through a lot together, bound to happen, nothing to worry about—"  
  
"Hobbes," Darien cut across him tiredly, "you're babbling."  
  
Bobby sniffed. "I don't do emotional scenes well, my friend. Ask my ex-wife."  
  
Darien snorted, and sighed, and glanced at his partner. "So. Forgiven and forgotten?"  
  
"Forgiven and forgotten," Hobbes promised, "but only if you get your ass out of this bed and get to work before Monroe or Claire kills us both." He rose from the bed and started for the front door. "And do something with your hair; it looks like a dog rolled around in it."  
  
He shut the door behind him.  
  
Fawkes stared after him, and thought again about that heart-stopping moment when he knew he was gonna die and that was the last moment he was gonna ever see his partner, and groaned, flopping back to bury his face under the pillow again. "Aw, crap," he muttered.  
  
"Fawkes! Get moving!" he heard from just outside the door.  
  
"Aw, _crap_," Darien groaned again and got up to face another day.


End file.
